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Comment by oleganza | Hacker News Reader

Paying in Bitcoin makes a lot of sense:

1) You don't have to provide private info like CC number.

2) If you bought bitcoins at X and now they are valued at 10X you may effectively enjoy 90% discount on all purchases.

All these mythical user-protecting chargebacks are almost never used by consumers for refunds (companies who care about brand help them settling refunds) and almost always for the cases when you CC details got stolen and used by someone else. Of course, bitcoin payments do not leak your private keys, so the entire class of problems goes away.

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And if you bought bitcoin at 10X and they are now valued at X you may effectively enjoy paying 1000% of asking price on all purchases.

The vast majority of Bitcoin purchases happened at below the current market value. Which I guess is what makes people so bitter they didn't buy earlier?

>> All these mythical user-protecting chargebacks are almost never used by consumers for refunds (companies who care about brand help them settling refunds) and almost always for the cases when you CC details got stolen and used by someone else.

Companies who don't care about brand and companies who have not yet established a brand are, however, somewhat indistinguishable.

The chargeback facility (among others) provides a cushion and safety net to allow consumers to transact in cases where they are less than 100% certain who they are dealing with.

Removing it would kill the ability of smaller businesses to transact as people like me would never give them any cash, and I would advise my non-technical friends and family to behave similarly.

I know this disagrees with your view on the world, sorry.

1) You're ordering something to be delivered you have to provide the same info.

2) True, but now once you've spent them does it make sense to buy them back and do it again?

Because most companies are afraid of chargebacks and will take steps to avoid them. Bitcoin payments don't but any minor lapse in personal computer security likely will.

For 2), surely you would have to pay capital gains tax on the increase in value. To be fully compliant with the law, it may be hard to enforce in reality.

Depends on your country of residence. In the US, I believe this is the case, in Denmark, this isn't the case (http://taxinsights.ey.com/archive/archive-news/danish-assess...).

Of course. It does vary on a country to country basis. I believe most countries consider BTC an asset rather than a currency, thus incurring the capital gains tax.

Sweden for example does, and I believe Norway as well. Funny that, Scandinavian countries usually have similar legislation. ( http://blog.btcx.se/bitcoin-nytt/dags-att-deklarera-bitcoin-... )

And if you bought Bitcoins at X and now they're valued at .1X... now what? A revolutionary new way to gamble on the price of an online purchase?

That never happened since 2011. Consider also investing for at least a year or two: in such case you have a 99,9% chance to be in a big fat profit. Wishing to buy BTC and get rich quick is a huge gamble. Or if you are not interested in holding BTC at all and only buy it to access certain markets (e.g. where CC do not work), then it's stable enough on an hourly basis. You'd waste more money on exchange fees anyway.

A credit card number is vaguely sensitive. It certainly isn't meaningfully private. A home address is similar, except it is less sensitive.

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